I don't know how country domains work legally, but I imagine twitch.tv might be very quick to respond to a request from Tuvalu.

The bigger (and richer) the market, the stronger a country is in negotiations. All those politicians who would like their country to leave the European Union should be reminded of this.

One solution (not an ideal solution) might be where every entity that wants to serve the citizens of a sovereign country have to have a local company that serves the local population, a local subsidiary like in most brick and mortar industries.

They may even require that all compute happen locally. And of course that all content and so on meet local regulations. Sort of like what we see with other telecommunication, be it T-mobile or other. Sure, they operate in many countries, but they have local staff and follow local rules.

Couldn't New Delhi just tell Youtube HQ to obey worldwide and enforce it on all their subsidiaries, or lose the market?

In that case it wouldn't matter how many intermediary entities are there between HQ and local operations.

Yah right now they could take that stand. In the future I can imagine an international governing body that would set rules around these things.

Seems like if you can just will an international governing body into existence, there isn't even any need for subsidiary cloak-and-dagger.

What if Alphabet calls the bluff and stops serving all of their services in the market. The population would know why which wouldn't be a good look for leaders. Google is too invested in $earch to call a bluff though.

Alphabet would be shooting themselves in the foot doing that, they'd be giving a local competitor a solid footing, which they could then expand from to the US

Google has competitors in the search space so it's understandable why they're afraid of calling bluffs.

And from what I understand Youtube isn't profitable by itself.

Why do you think it’s unprofitable? Last estimate I looked at showed YouTube as being wildly profitable.

Can you link to the estimate?

YouTube revenue got a huge bump in 2021 which is when that wildly profitable estimate was given.

I don’t have specific estimates I can link to, but I’ve seen statements like this fairly regularly: There are more questions around YouTube’s profitability, but he said the general view was that it was “modestly profitable but not dramatically so.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...

Of course when Google actually disclosed what percentage of their revenue came from YouTube it was well below the 20% suggested in that piece.

> YouTube revenue got a huge bump in 2021 which is when that wildly profitable estimate was given. I don’t have specific estimates I can link to...

What is 'that wildly profitable estimate' then?

They did that with China.

And Chinese entrepreneurs just kind of said, "SWEET!", then swept in with their own startups offering those services.

I'd imagine there are a lot of Indians, even here in the US, that would make a headlong rush back to India to start up web service companies if our companies said we won't service India any longer.

India is kind of moving towards this? Data security is a big discussion in whatever policy discussion is left in the country. I think legislation is in the works to mandate that all data related to indian citizens need to be in India and not leave it's virtual borders.

Mainland China already does this. The extent to which this is a real solution are pretty dubious. When the local rules are reasonable and local everything is fine, but a large enough country the government can start trying to use its weight to encroach on the severity of other countries and push across whatever fence the company has set up.